My name is Saul!I'm an award winning Word of Mouth Marketer, Professional Speaker on the subjects of Social Media, Customer Service and best of all... Word of Mouth.I collect Air Force One sneakers and think you should hire me... (as a consultant) to teach you how to get your company doing interesting things!

Photos from the Drupal Conference in San Francisco, CA 2010

Monday, May 05, 2008

4

I wish Bloggers and PR people would just have dirty sex already!

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OK, so here is a true story about something that happened to me last week. I happen to be minding my own business in a hospital and I wandered in to the emergency room where I saw a doctor preforming a procedure. This was a bloody mess of a thing and right in the middle I noticed that the Doctor forgot to clamp off an artery that resulted the patient to start to bleed. I brought this to the attention of the Doctor and patted myself on the back for sticking with ER even after George Clooney left only to find that the Doctor didn’t appreciate me telling him how to do his job. He went on and on about how I didn’t go to medical school and that he knows how to fix people and am an amature who is just pretending to do the job of people who go to school for a long time and usually work their way to a place of authority.

This really stuck with me. Mostly because the patient bled to death and I watched but also because most of the same feelings I had in the ER were revisited over this weekend reading blog post after blog post about bloggers telling PR folks how to do their jobs and how they shouldn’t bother bloggers with Press Releases and not to pitch them this way or that way.

Yes, I am a blogger and Yes because I am listed in the AD AGE Power 150 list I get a lot of attention from PR folks but (and I think I am in the minority) I like the attention and have been offered some cool invitations and even given a product or two for free. This by no means is why I started blogging but it is a perk I enjoy and hope it continues.

Maybe I just don’t take myself seriously enough and don’t think of myself as a journalist but I can’t bring myself to complain about people showing me a little love….sure I get plenty of Press Releases but at the same time I also get plenty of letters from the widows of dead royalty and you don’t see me complaining about wealthy widows wanting to give me money….OK I did twitter about it once but I treat those emails the same I treat any email I get that I am not interested in…..I delete them.

Yep, you read that correctly. If someone sends me an email I am not interested in I delete it…not email them back and try to teach them anything and I don’t run and blog about it. I just delete it.

Weird Huh?

Sure I read everything that comes because I respect that these people have a job to do and while not every offer I receive is a sexy one I don’t and would never belittle them and disrespect them. I love PR (big shout out to LexPR, HighRoad and 5W PR) people and have had a crush on at least one person in every PR team I have ever worked with. That being typed I think most bloggers (of elevated status) only want the cool stuff. You never hear people blogging about “Oh Geeze. I was just offered a super cool camera to use for 6 months and report if I liked it….when will this torture end” it is usually about not cool opportunities.

I can only speak for myself but I wish I could get more free stuff. I am not ashamed to say it makes me feel like a big shot and I think others agree. But it seems to me that some bloggers only want the cool stuff and not the lame stuff.

I say you have to take the good and take the bad. You take them both and there you have the facts of like….ohhh the facts of life.

Oh and by the way….if you are a PR person reading this I wouldn’t mind:Free Nikes, a Wii, a fancy watch, calf implants, a new car, a sexy nanny and robot…make that a sexy robot!

…and if you were wondering, I might have exaggerated the Hospital story.

I agree with you totally, Saul, but I think the bloggers who are upset are the ones for whom the blogging thing is a paid gig, so they do consider themselves journalists, I think. It’s just growing pains as we all become creators of media rather than just consumers of it. If we can all get a few pairs of shoes or some electronics out of it, great.

But I would warn any PR person who sent me something that I’m just as likely to blog about how horrible it is as how good it is. You can buy coverage, but you can’t buy good coverage. Unless, of course, your product is good.

I think this whole blacklisting thing gets dangerous. How does that blogger really know that person hasn’t been reading them for two years? What has to go in the email to “prove” that? Does that even matter? Should you at least listen to someone that has given you readership for two years? Heck I’d hope so.

Maybe there should be some sort of “How to Pitch a Blogger” template. Perhaps it should have questions like: How long have you been reading the blog?; What’s your favorite post?; Where are the comments you’ve left me before?

Seriously, though. I’m a blogger. Have been for a couple years. I just happen to also have a product to push. I haven’t pitched any bloggers, really. One big reason? I’m hesitant to do it because some seem so trigger-happy.

This is the best blog post ever. I laughed, I cried, and I will be blogging about it later. Thanks for the fantastic analogy about the love/hate chemistry between bloggers and PR folks. I totally agree — one decadent night of hot hate sex would clear this mess right up. Thanks and I’m now officially your biggest fan, thanks to @vasta who Tweeted me in your direction! Cheers.